After seeing a hack attempt on bugzilla.kernel.org’s password file, I got wondering “what if that had succeeded”. After looking at the stored password database in firefox, it turned out that I had been quite lazy and had reused my password for that site on many others. Spent a whole afternoon visiting websites to create unique passwords for every log in.

As my memory isn’t so fantastic, this means I now keep my passwords written down. The downside of this being a single point of failure (If someone gets this file, they have everything — though they’d need my gpg key & password to read it), is outweighed by the fact that as I don’t have to remember them, choosing longer passwords with more weird characters is possible. Though amusingly, quite a few websites don’t like passwords like 0N}nn:/6hai\h5eM, and complain that they aren’t secure enough.